Brooke de Lench

MomsTEAM Institute's Executive Director, Brooke de Lench, announced today the election of Ben Utecht to the Institute's Board of Directors. A former NFL tight end and Super Bowl champion whose career was cut short by a fifth diagnosed concussion, Utecht has become a passionate and tireless advocate for raising awareness about sports-related concussions, and for supporting research about concussion and traumatic brain injury.

MomsTEAM Insitute is among a select group of 40 sport and development organizations from
across the globe working with UNICEF UK to further develop, implement
and test a new set of International Safeguards for Children in Sport.

Brooke de Lench will be participating in "The Sports Injury Epidemic" conference presented by the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga on April 15-16 which will explore and highlight issues related to prevention and management of sports injuries at the high school and college level.

A 2014 study (Rowson S, Duma S, et al 2014) reporting that football helmet design can reduce concussion risk has prompted criticism from some of the football helmet manufacturers whose helmets were not involved in the study. In the interest of accurate and complete reporting on the study, set out below is the full text of an email dated February 10, 2014 from Rob Erb, Chief Executive Officer of Schutt Helmets.

On Sunday morning, I appeared as a guest on a ESPN's weekly program "Outside The Lines" on a segment titled "NFL: Marketing To Moms."

ESPN deserves kudos for its "Outside The Lines" segment on the NFL's marketing to moms, but, while it did a great job of identifying the fact that football moms are looking for a source of objective information about youth football safety, it could have done more to highlight the fact that such sources already exist.

The Princeton (NJ) Public Library will be hosting a free screening of the PBS documentary, "The Smartest Team: Making High School Football Safer," on Tuesday, January 7th from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.Rosemarie Scolaro Moser, PhD,
Director of the Sports Concussion Center of New Jersey and a featured
expert in "The Smartest Team," and the documentary's producer/director, Brooke de Lench, Founder and Publisher of MomsTEAM.com,
will be on hand after the screening to answer questions parents,
coaches and athletes have about the making of the film or about
concussions in general.

After kicking off with our premiere on Oklahoma Educational Television (OETA - PBS) in August, and with stations in North Carolina and Colorado having aired the documentary in September, the beginning of October marks the first full week of broadcasts on PBS stations in more than ten states.

The buzz about the PBS documentary, "The Smartest Team," has been overwhelmingly positive, but some appear to be working overtime, on Twitter, through a whisper campaign, and via other back-channel means, to cripple MomsTEAM's ability to get its message out. Brooke de Lench explains.

The Brooke de Lench
documentary, "The Smartest Team: Making High School Football Safer,"
will have its world television broadcast premiere on the Oklahoma
Educational Television Association (OETA)(PBS) on Wednesday, August 14, 2013
at 10:00 p.m.
CDT.